Rethinking the Old Public Functionary

By late December 1860, President James Buchanan was easily the most despised man in America, and particularly in the North. “The President,” one supporter observed glumly, “seems to be execrated now by four fifths of the people of all parties” – and this in New York City, the center of the cotton trade and the most pro-Southern city in the free states.

In his own time and ever since, the 15th president has been castigated as worse than useless; his purported failure to act resolutely in the face of secession is often cast as a leading factor in the country’s descent into war. Certainly the “Old Public Functionary,” as he was known, deserves his place in the bottom rank of chief executives. But there are also historical considerations that make his actions during the secession crisis a bit more understandable.

Northerners’ loathing for Buchanan was nothing new. Early on his administration’s zealously pro-Southern policies and corruption scandals had alienated both Republicans and free-state members of his own Democratic Party; the latter was especially disgruntled by his vicious patronage war against Stephen A. Douglas, a popular Democratic senator from Illinois.

But condemnation of “Old Buck” reached new depths in December 1860. Buchanan’s assertion, in a speech early in the month, that although no state had the right to secede, the federal government had no authority to coerce a state into remaining provoked general scorn. His cabinet was disintegrating. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott publicly lambasted the administration for not taking the strong stand that he insisted would deter disunion. Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson of Mississippi traversed the Lower South as one of numerous state agents negotiating a multi-state secession. The administration’s official organ, the Washington Constitution, openly favored disunion. And within days of South Carolina’s formal secession on Dec. 20, a scandal erupted over the War Department’s freewheeling use of Indian trust-fund money — followed almost immediately by Secretary of War John B. Floyd’s astonishingly ill-advised decision to order the transfer of heavy artillery from a Pittsburgh foundry to Deep South forts.

The public response was almost universally negative. When rumors reached Springfield, Ill., that Buchanan had negotiated the surrender of Deep South federal forts, President-elect Abraham Lincoln said, “If that is true, they ought to hang him,” and then wrote to Republican leaders assuring them that, upon assuming office, he would act to retake lost federal possessions. Northerners of both parties weighed in on whether the president was “imbecile, and not competent to the emergency; or has so far committed himself to the authors of the evils that are now upon us” – that is, the secessionists – “that he is either tacitly acquiescing, or secretly promoting their aims and ends.”

One imaginative Massachusetts Democrat opined that “the best thing that could now be done for the Country would be to Send down to Washington a delegation of Old Women, armed with Six pieces of…diaper to clout Mr. Buchanan, double and triplicate and to pin them on his posteriors with a wooden skure instead of a diaper pin for he has evidently got the bowel complaint.”

Few historians share the suspicion of some contemporaries that Buchanan was colluding with the secessionists, but most concur with one senator’s characterization of the 15th president as “feeble, vacillating & irresolute.” Yet it is unrealistic to think that in 1860 the White House could have been occupied by a chief executive willing to take a sufficiently bold stand.

Library of CongressA poster for James Buchanan’s 1856 Campaign.

That’s in part because of party politics. Four years earlier the Democratic Party was in grave danger of succumbing to the sectional hostility that had already consumed the Whig Party and given birth to the openly anti-Southern Republicans. If the party was to retain the loyalty of both its Northern and Southern wings in the 1856 election, selection of a presidential candidate with strong convictions – someone like the controversial Stephen Douglas – was impossible. So the party chose a Northern candidate with traditional Democratic views on the limited nature of federal power and a history of sharing Southern views regarding property rights in slavery. And those, of course, are precisely the convictions Buchanan displayed in the winter of 1860-61.

Bolstering Buchanan’s natural caution and conservatism was his sense of history: the United States, he knew, had been faced with numerous sectional crises over slavery before, and each one had been resolved through compromise. As far back as 1787, threats of Deep South delegates not to ratify the new constitution had forced Convention delegates in Philadelphia to find middle ground on such thorny issues as congressional power to ban slave imports, the counting of slaves in apportioning each states’ representation in Congress and the right to retrieve fugitive slaves who had escaped across state lines. A generation later, in 1820 and ’21, Congress had resolved the first great threat of disunion, over whether Missouri should be added as a slave state, with mutual concessions that became known as the Missouri Compromise.

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Then, in 1833, as President Andrew Jackson prepared to start a civil war by marching troops into South Carolina to enforce federal law, congressional leaders again struck a bargain that prevented hostilities. And as recently as 1850, when the country had nearly torn itself apart over the spread of slavery into the vast new territories conquered from Mexico, a complex congressional settlement had yet again averted secession.

Given this long history of compromise, Buchanan was confident that Congress would settle this crisis, too, if given the chance. Thus his chief role, as he saw it, was to guarantee the peace long enough for Congress to do its work.

Indeed, Buchanan was doing all he could to encourage congressional negotiations. Not only did he offer his own compromise proposal – a constitutional amendment designed, naturally, to protect slaveholders’ property rights from meddling Northern radicals – but, he quietly sent Duff Green, once a member of Andrew Jackson’s notorious “kitchen cabinet,” to speak with Lincoln in Springfield, Ill. Recognizing that compromise was impossible without the support of congressional Republicans, he hoped that Green could persuade the president-elect to join him in publicly advocating compromise.

Meanwhile, Buchanan declared (paraphrasing Job) that he would “come between the factions as a daysman, with one hand on the head of each, counseling peace.” In practical terms, this meant he would bend over backward not to goad secessionists even as he tried to maintain the Union. On the one hand, he sent an emissary to the South Carolina secession convention in a vain effort to counsel calm and reason, permitted Secretary Thompson to travel the Deep South (wrongly believing that he was discouraging disunion) and pronounced Jan. 4 a day of national fasting and prayer. On the other hand, he publicly rejected both the right and the wisdom of secession and refused (according to his own account, at least) to commit himself to a formal truce with South Carolina representatives.

The president also declined to reinforce the federal forts in the Deep South, fearing that doing so would ignite hostilities, and he replaced the garrison commander at the most dangerous of these, Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, with a man whose Southern background, he believed, would help mollify the Carolinians: Maj. Robert Anderson of Kentucky. Buchanan wasn’t selling out to the South, though: He authorized Anderson to take whatever action he deemed necessary to defend his command, and he readied the warship Brooklyn to carry reinforcements to Charleston should Anderson need them.

But by late 1860, compromise was an increasingly unlikely outcome, and Buchanan’s efforts came across as naïve, weak and possibly traitorous, an image that has stuck ever since. Yet few of the men who have occupied the White House could have stood up to the challenge of the moment. Was Buchanan the strong, vigorous leader his contemporaries believed the times demanded? No. But neither was he the feeble, unprincipled caricature in which history has cast him.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.